Finally, I came around to implement scripted actions for Kate in KDE SC 4.6. Let’s take a look at how this works. When Kate starts, it searches for $KDEDIRS/share/apps/katepart/script/ for *.js files. As example, let’s take a look at utils.js there:

the header tells kate that there is an exported function “moveLinesDown”

so when Kate Part is loaded, it calls “action(moveLinesDown)” to check whether this function should be exposed in the GUI. Here, we return the action info that includes the displayed text, an icon, a category, whether the script needs user input (interactive) and a default shortcut. Of course, you can change the shortcuts, and also configure the toolbars to show the actions.

With this, every user is able to script arbitrary editing functions for Kate Part. We don’t have to implement all those helpers in C++ anymore. The result looks like this:You can have this already now, you just have to use the development version of Kate 🙂

Back in February, I blogged about Kate’s move to gitorious. The main reason for this move was to make building Kate as easy as possible. If you want to build Kate as part of KDE, (as of now) you have to compile kdesupport, phonon, dbusmenu-qt, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase for kwrite and kdesdk for the kate application. Getting all this done is a huge effort, especially if you are new to KDE development (I very well remember my own times spending weeks to get everything going. Be aware of new contributors might now close to nothing about KDE and all the dependencies!).
As getting new contributors is essential for keeping a project alive, the barrier to get involved should be as low as possible. And exactly this was achieved by moving all pieces to one place (this was gitorious for us). Building Kate is so simple right now that we can even make bug reporters build Kate out of the box. This helps a lot, and even results in patches from time to time. We also got quite some merge requests.
There were several voices at that time that considered moving “away from KDE” was very bad. However, this is not the case, as Christoph is synchronizing all the changes in KDE’s subversion and gitorious almost every day. This is certainly not optimal, but looking back at the last months, we can say it was worth it.
KDE is moving to git.kde.org in the near future. This also raises the discussion about how KDE’s source code will be organized. Speaking for Kate, we certainly want to have all of Kate’s code in one place, just as it is now with gitorious, no matter what 🙂 I hope we can find a solution the KDE community can live with. To be discussed, maybe in Tampere in two weeks? 🙂